With the increasing globalization of business and trade, it is common practice for business organizations to establish manufacturing and/or distribution operations in a number of countries so as to better service local markets, and to utilize localize labor and natural resources.
Database systems are often crucial to the proper and efficient functioning of a business operation. The utilization of Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) and, more recently, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to leverage database resources effectively has increased sharply as appreciation of the potential benefits of these systems has become recognized. The database systems employed by MRP and ERP systems are typically relational databases, which are commonly understood in the art to store information in tables which are linked by keys. An example of such a prior art table is designated generally at 1 in FIG. 1. The table 1 is comprised of a number of columns and rows, each row storing a record having a number of fields. Corresponding fields within the records define a column of the table 1. In this example, the table 1 stores records for items stocked by a hardware retailer.
A multinational company typically maintains a central database, to which all branch operations have access, or may alternatively provide mirror copies of a central database at each of the branch operations. In either case, it will be appreciated that local conditions at the branch offices will typically vary, and some of the data within a central database may be inappropriate for such local conditions. For example, currency denominations and language preferences may vary from location to location. In such cases, the adaptation of a central database to local conditions may require a specialist data programmer continually to update the database. For example, referring to table 1 a database expert may be required to replace the word "hammers" with a local translation in the table 1. In the case of large databases, this task may prove difficult, if not impossible, to perform. Further, the use of a database expert to make these types of modifications is undesirable from a cost and efficiency viewpoint.
One potential solution to the above mentioned problem is proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,442,782 to Malatesta et al., which teaches providing information from a multi-lingual database of language-independent and language-dependent items.